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I was watching Daredevil last night and I had this idea about politics, and it’s not super well-thought out but I thought I’d run it by you guys. The idea is that conservatives and liberals both have their own spheres of expertise, and arguments happen when they overstep their boundaries and get in each other’s way. I had this idea of nations (or even villages or whatever) as a soft center with a hard defensive ring around it.

A liberal’s sphere would be the soft center. The liberal makes sure the village (or whatever) is nice to be in. Everybody has a good time, life isn’t extremely unfair, people have rights, there’s public works and projects you can put money into, artists get looked after, the old and the weak are taken care of, stuff like that. A conservative’s sphere would be the hard outer ring, and their job would be to defend the soft center. Being hardasses, sending out warnings to outsiders who get too close, making judgment calls on who should be killed or detained, deciding how raids should be carried out, questioning ideas or plans made by people outside the ring who want to come inside the ring, enforcing rules with the right amount of severity so that the group is protected, that would be their area.

Both groups are perfectly suited for their areas, and totally unsuited for the other’s area. A liberal working in the outer defensive ring would let their empathy run away with them and let outsiders do what they want to the outer ring, thus endangering the entire village. A conservative who dicks around in the soft center would start trying to “lay down the law” on shit he has no idea about, like reproductive systems, Dungeons and Dragons, who’s bangin’ who in an unorthodox manner, what music people can listen to, and pretty soon the soft center would become hellish and unfit to live in.

I think this might be a good system because no one “side” has to beat the other “side”. As it is now, liberals and conservatives are in a desperate deathmatch, but it’s like an MMA fighter against a WWF wrestler in a rap battle. They’re thinking and acting using completely different sets of rules because they see the world in completely different ways. No side can ever “beat” the other side; the only thing they can do is ramp up the intensity of the argument and make things uncomfortable for someone like me. Of course, in order for an idea like this to work, people with opposing views (actually, opposing brain types, I think) would have to be able to chill out and see the value of the opposing side. That doesn’t mean you have to “give in” to the other side, you don’t even have to agree that they might be right, you just have to see their potential value to the tribe.

Like I was saying, I was watching Daredevil (beginning of season 2 so, SPOILER ALERT and also DON’T SPOIL IT FOR ME) and saw the incredible second battle between Daredevil and the Punisher which is followed by a great argument that made me extremely uncomfortable but was so inspiring. Of course the whole thing is Daredevil’s “don’t kill people” philosophy versus Punisher’s “kill bad people so they don’t kill good people” philosophy. Punisher said something incredibly insightful: “You don’t get to pick what makes you whole.” Bam! Right there. It doesn’t matter how much Daredevil argues with him, or how sane and rational he thinks he is, in the end, the Punisher is made for living in the outer defensive ring of the village. He won’t feel alive unless he knows he’s protecting the soft center though incredible acts of unbelievable violence. The series does a great job of showing how disturbing the Punisher’s life is, with crime scene photos of mutilated bodies covered in gore, which is also counterbalanced by seeing criminals running and hiding and fearing for their life (loved seeing that one guy shit his pants when he realized the Punisher really was going to walk into a hospital with a shotgun and blast him – there was nowhere he could hide).

Daredevil made some good arguments too, though – as long as you live in the soft center. There is always good in people, and you have to trust your species and see the good in them. Everyone deserves a chance. Of course, his argument is a little awkward, because he’s fighting crime but not killing anyone, which only makes sense if you have superpowers (most people don’t), and doesn’t really work on the outer defensive ring.

Oh yeah, I also thought this might be a good system to work within just in case of alien invasion, which I think is inevitable. And yes I mean the UFOs from Mars variety (“They said alien and Vasquez thought they said illegal alien…”). It would be better if our different brain types (in this case, liberal and conservative) each knew their appropriate area so that we could work better together against alien invasion, rather than let aliens play both sides against the other while they divide our resources among themselves. I see people having meltdowns now, but in the future, every living person will live deep underground and they’ll look at old photos of us strutting around on the surface of the planet, and while they work on assembly lines to make laser rifles and mini-nukes they will wish that they could have lived in our time – yes, the very time that everyone is currently complaining about. They will wonder what everyone was bitching and moaning about because they will be worried about creatures burrowing down from the surface and possibly attacking one of the child care centers, which is the worst possible scenario for any underground bunker city.

Game developers should make a virtual reality simulation for people who enjoy the endorphin rush of outrage.

The simulation would have to be so engaging that it draws everybody deeply entrenched in the cult of politics out of everybody else’s way. Imagine if facebook or twitter were filled with people living unique lives with interesting perspectives! Instead, both forums are a series of endless arguments and troll-wars and preachy moralizing between the two most bottom-of-the-barrel, played out perspectives that ever simplified the unimaginably complex human narrative: the old liberal versus conservative paradigm. What a shame!

VR Sim: Politics Is Real would be a two-disc set, with one set of games for liberals and another set for conservatives. Pick your poison! There would be many games on each disc. Here are some game ideas, in no particular order.

For liberals, a game called RE-EDUCATION CAMP. The point of this game would be to find people who are not one hundred percent on board with a futuristic utopian society and put them in re-education camps. The guests at the camps must be turned into good human beings through hard labor, food restriction, and challenging indoctrination mini-games.

For conservatives, a war sim called CALL OF JESUS: MODERN WARGOD. This highly popular game would be a perfect way to get ultra-conservatives from the world’s most annoying religions – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – and stick them in a world where they can kill one another over and over and over again while leaving everybody else free to relax and read a book or take a dog on a walk.

For liberals, a game called ESCAPE FROM KITCHEN. In this game, a female protagonist has been chained to an oven by an evil husband who guards the exit. The player will have to use their wits to avoid making her captor anything to eat, thus starving him to death while avoiding starvation herself. Once the cell phone item has been found, the player will be able to eat food by downloading it from Pinterest photos. Other bonus power-ups: college diploma, CEO suit, and abortion machine.

For conservatives, a game called DON’T BE GAY. The point of this game would be to navigate a labyrinth full of homoerotic imagery and tantalizingly forbidden sights, but still make the choice to be a straight man. Successfully getting through the labyrinth would require you to move away from monsters that look like physically fit, scantily clad young men, and yet somehow not have sex with them. Occasionally the player would find an “assault rifle” power-up that would allow them to rack up points by shooting homosexuals, sort of like when Pac-Man ate a magical bean or whatever and was able to eat ghosts for a limited time.

For liberals, a game called FANTASTIC RACIST VOYAGE. In this game, racism has nearly been eradicated, but a few molecules of racism still exist deep inside one single human being. Players are shrunk down and injected into the body of this individual, and they must cooperate to hunt down the last few molecules of racism and blast them before they can grow into racism-cancer and spread from host to host, once again turning humanity into a bunch of shitty, awful racists. The player will only have about five minutes to hunt down this facet of humanity that has slowly formed over hundreds of thousands of years, so it will be a really pulse-pounding race against time.

For conservatives, a game called FRATERNAL ORDER OF THE BROTHERHOOD. In this game you enroll in a fraternity and engage in a series of drinking games while avoiding taking any classes or learning anything about the knowledge your species has accumulated over thousands of years. At the end of the game you become so inebriated that you can barely even see the family business you inherit.

For liberals, a game called LOVE-COP. “Part man, part liberal, all cop,” is the tagline. In this game, the player would be a police officer patrolling a dangerous neighborhood armed only with hugs and good intentions. I’m sort of drawing a blank on this one… other than crawling into a sewer drain and waiting until your shift is over, I’m not sure how the player would survive. Ultimately I think the game would turn into a shooter, but with little hearts rather than bullets taking down violent perpetrators.

For conservatives, a game called ALWAYS A REBEL (SOMETIMES). In this game, every stage begins with a rousing quote from the freedom-loving founding fathers. The player will be filled with a sense that they should fight to pursue happiness based on their individual will. But then the gameplay will juxtapose that with a grueling level-grinding system in places like military bases, corporate offices, and churches. The classic gameplay design “A jumps, B shoots” will be replaced with “A means ‘yes sir!’ and B proudly tows the line.” How much of a rules-obeying lickspittle can you be for your corporate masters? Are you willing to defend freedom and human dignity by shining your military officer’s shoes like a good boy? Gameplay will do another 180 during boss-fights against pacifists, hippies, people from technologically undeveloped nations unlucky enough to be sitting on valuable resources, and women who ruin football season by speaking out against wealthy rapist athletes. In those instances, players will have to ruthlessly smash any opposition by generally being a shitty person.

For liberals, a game called GENDERFLUX. Since gender isn’t based on biology, but on social conditioning, players will have to give a child the freedom to choose their own gender by indoctrinating them into believing they are a different gender than they appear to be. Keeping toy guns and cars away from boys, and dolls and cooking sets and anything pink away from girls, is a must in this Super Mario-inspired run-and-jump game that shows you how shitty you are for assuming Mario is a man and the Princess is a woman.

For conservatives, a military shooter with the challenge rating turned all the way down. The player is a soldier equipped with modern weapons and dozens of heavily equipped allies, and even tanks and helicopters, in an endless war against outnumbered enemies equipped with Stone Age weapons or a few shoddy firearms cobbled together during the Cold War. If the player ever feels the least bit challenged, he can call in an airstrike from a stealth bomber flying so fast and so far above the playing field that the enemy cannot even target them. All boss fights are merely accidental friendly fire incidents due to some levels being so choked by friendly units. Every stage begins with a briefing given by a military commander who has an extreme right-wing Israeli politician whispering in his ear.

For liberals, a game called EVERY CULTURE IS GREAT EXCEPT YOURS. A game inspired by Civilization in which players don’t manage their own civilization, but everyone else’s. Players will work hard to promote and cultivate computer-controlled opponents who gratefully accept resources and charity workers. Players will have to ignore the advancements of their own civilization with a series of eye-rolling and head-shaking as they accumulate Guilt Points. The player can gain Smug Self-Satisfaction points for ignoring or downplaying the atrocities committed by other civilizations.

For conservatives, a game called ONLY AMERICA EXISTS. In this Civilization-inspired game, computer controlled opponents do not look like humans, but instead look like the resources they have. The player already begins the game with an incredible array of military units, but the challenge of turning the whole world into one giant red, white, and blue paradise comes from your own limp-wristed, gutless, whiny civilian populace, who have to be carefully managed. Getting resources won’t be easy. Instead of developing Achievements or Great Wonders, the player will have to develop a research tree that includes carefully controlled narratives, media manipulations, and Political Hero units who can say incredibly simple jingoistic phrases that will get people excited about stealing resources from other nations – or, rather, liberating foreign people from tyrants who oppose freedom and democracy.

The trailer for the liberal set of games would show a group of Democratic politicians hugging each other and petting a group of deer peacefully making their way through the senate building. “Let’s pass a bill that will create world peace and end hunger and equalize equality equally everywhere!” one of the peaceful Democrats would say. Then a terrible shadow would fill the room and a Republican with glowing red eyes would say, “I’LL GO ALONG WITH THAT… BUT ONLY IF WE EDIT THE BILL, EVER SO SLIGHTLY, TO INCLUDE DEATH CAMPS FOR ALL POOR PEOPLE AND MINORITIES! HA HA HAAAA!!!”

Well dear reader, the flow of ideas has suddenly ended, so I’ll end this here. If you hated this, please let me know.